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I posted this on Facebook two years ago on April 2, 2016. I had been asked to speak on Hillary Clinton’s behalf at our County Convention. I wouldn’t change a word of this.

So… some people asked me if they could see what I intended to say today at the Washoe County Democratic Convention, before I was booed and heckled and lost enough of my five minutes that I was asked to cut it short. Below are my full remarks:

When I was asked speak to you, I was at once happy and nervous. After all, I knew I’d be talking to a ‘mixed crowd.’ But I know that I have friends on both sides of the arena today.

Mostly I wanted to honor Hillary Rodham Clinton and her life’s work, and why I believe she should be the next President of the United States. And five minutes just isn’t enough time to do her justice.

I have a confession to make. I have not always been Hillary Clinton’s biggest fan.

It wasn’t until I actually began to push through the media narrative to examine her history, her life-long commitment to issues near and dear to my heart, her ability to work across the aisle to make things better for people, and the loyalty and friendships she’s made and kept over the years, that I began to look at her in a new light, and how, eventually, she moved from last place to first in my personal Presidential Preference Poll. I’ve been on board ever since.

And I’m not the only one she has won over. As Jon Favreau, President Obama’s speech writer (and 2007 Hillary Clinton nemesis) wrote recently:

“This same story has repeated itself throughout Clinton’s career: those who initially view her as distrustful and divisive from afar find her genuine and cooperative in person. It was the case with voters in New York, Republicans in the Senate, Obama people in the White House, and heads of state all over the world. There’s a reason being America’s chief diplomat was the specific job Obama asked Hillary to do—she has the perfect personality for it.”

There is no candidate running to be the President of the United States who is better prepared to take on the responsibilities of the job who has the depth of knowledge and breadth of experience to deal with the many challenges facing our country that Hillary Clinton has. No one.

I know that when she is in the White House I won’t have to worry about national and world affairs. I know that she has the ability and the intelligence to handle whatever comes her way.

For me, it all comes down to this: She cares. And she always has. But, honestly? The caring part is easy. The solutions part, the fighting to make it right part? That’s hard. That takes a plan. And let me tell you, the woman has a plan. She has lots of them. She has plans for the big challenges and the small ones.

She is a problem solver. She doesn’t wring her hands and point fingers. She gathers the best minds she can, and works to find common ground and solutions that will benefit as many people as possible. This has been her way for decades. As she said at the conclusion of her 1995 speech in Beijing:

“We must move beyond rhetoric. We must move beyond recognition of problems to working together… to have the common efforts to build that common ground we hope to see.”

I trust her to fight for us in the things that matter most for us. The kind of things that, indeed, keep us up at night.

I trust her to fight for women and children, because she always has, from her earliest days with the Children’s Defense Fund, through her years as First Lady of Arkansas, as First Lady of the United States, as United States Senator and finally, as Secretary of State. The advancement of women and children has always been her focus.

I trust her to fight for the right of women to make their own reproductive choices. As Senator, Hillary Clinton introduced 8 pieces of legislation with the clear purpose of expanding and protecting women’s access to reproductive health care — more than any other presidential candidate.

I trust her to fight for equal pay for equal work.

I trust her to fight to make college affordable for all.

I trust her to stand up to Wall Street.

I trust her to fight for universal health care and to build on the successes of the Affordable Care Act and work to fix where it falls short. Health care has been her fight for decades and she’s not stopping now.

I trust her to take on substance abuse and to work end the stigma of mental illness.

I trust her to fight for veterans.

I trust her to fight for the Dreamers.

I trust her to fight to reform our criminal justice system.

I trust her to fight to end gun violence.

I trust her to fight inequality in all its forms.

I trust her because she understands that the problems we face are multi-faceted and complex. That more often than not there is not a one-size fits all solution to a problem. That intersectionality requires working on numerous fronts to address what looks to be a singular problem.

I trust her to fight for us, not because she says she will, but because she’s been doing it for decades.

I trust her to fight for us, because she IS a fighter. No matter how much is thrown at her, no matter how many times she’s knocked down, she stands back up and gets to work.

Which brings me to my final point. At her 2009 Senate confirmation hearing to be Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton said:

“Too often, we see the ills that plague us more clearly than the possibilities in front of us, but it is the real possibility of progress, of that better life free from fear and want and discord, that offers our most compelling message to the rest of the world.”

At the end of the day, Hillary gives me hope. She has a spirit of deep optimism that I often struggle to find. Not a blind faith Panglossian “everthing’s great” optimism, but a deep abiding faith in the American people and in the future of our country and the world.

I don’t know where she gets it. It is something deep in her core. She has a resilience and strength that gives me hope just enough ledge to keep my toes on.

And that’s why I’m With Her.

Thank you.

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Re-upping this 2010 post from my now shuttered blog, Blue Lyon. The only edit I would make is to add this to the third paragraph: “See also the treatment of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and its aftermath.”

A Sunday Morning Reading: Carl Sagan, Science and Witchcraft

In The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Ballantine Books, 1996), Carl Sagan stressed over and over again the need for science literacy, critical thinking and skepticism. We need not understand the finer points of each scientific discipline, but we need to understand the scientific method and how to apply it in our daily lives, as well as in our national and international policy-making.

Sagan also argued that ignorance of what-came-before can set us up to commit the same errors in the here-and-now. Understanding the past is key to living in the present and planning for the future. To not know our history and our human propensity for unskeptical thinking is to doom us to continually make the same mistakes, to never move forward, or worse, finish ourselves off as a species.

If we do not know what we’re capable of, we cannot appreciate measures taken to protect us from ourselves. I discussed the European witch mania in the alien abduction context; I hope the reader will forgive me for returning to it in its political context. It is an aperture to human self-knowledge. If we focus on what was considered acceptable evidence and a fair trial by the religious and secular authorities in the fifteenth-to-seventeenth century witch hunts, many of the novel and peculiar features of the eighteenth-century U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights become clear: including trial by jury, prohibitions against self-incrimination and against cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and the press, due process, the balance of powers and the separation of church and state.Friedrich von Spee (pronounced “Shpay”) was a Jesuit priest who had the misfortune to hear the confessions of those accused of witchcraft in the German City of Würzburg (see Chapter 7). In 1631, he published Cautio Criminalis (Precautions for Prosecutors), which exposed the essence of the Church/State terrorism against the innocent. Before he was punished he died of the plague – as a parish priest serving the afflicted. Here is an except from his whistle-blowing book: Continue reading “What does Carl Sagan have to do with Hillary Clinton?”→

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I cannot believe we are still fighting this bullshit. I wrote this eleven years ago on May 12, 2006 on my now-shuttered blog, Blue Lyon.

The telecoms want to create a tiered Internet where web page owners who can pay for speed will get faster loading pages, etc. Right now the Internet works much the same way that phone service works. We all pay our monthly charges and we all get the same service. You pick up the phone, dial the number, and voila! your call goes through at the same speed as George Bush’s or Paris Hilton’s. It doesn’t matter who you are or who you are calling.

Currently the same sort of system applies for web hosting. When we pay our monthly web hosting fee, it doesn’t matter who we are, what the content is on our pages or anything. My web page doesn’t load faster than Amazon.com’s, nor does their web site load faster than mine. Both load at the same speed. But, if the telecoms have their way, not only will we be paying for access to the web, owners of web site will ALSO be required to pay fees that will allow their pages to load quickly. If they can’t afford it, too bad. Their sites will be choked off. Even the big names on the Internet (Amazon.com, Google, etc) are against this, yet, it appears that our Congress Critters are in bed with the Telecoms. Click on the ad to the right. Learn more. Sign the petition to protect Net Neutrality, call your legislators.

Without net neutrality rules, internet service providers ranging from home broadband companies like Comcast to wireless data providers like Verizon would be free to slow video streams, charge you extra to access particular content, or outright block you from visiting sites. Net neutrality advocates worry that this would be a huge blow to free expression online, as well as hamper innovation as smaller companies might have to shell out to large telcos to get their content seen by the public. Wyden echoes those concerns, and especially worries about the impact on small businesses in his state.

The FCC passed the current incarnation of its rules in early 2015, and it was immediately sued by the broadband industry. These days, the industry says it doesn’t mind net neutrality in and of itself, but opposes the part of the FCC’s Open Internet Order that reclassifies internet service providers as “Title II” common carriers, which means they’re regulated more like traditional telephone service providers.

The trouble with the industry’s argument is that thanks to a lawsuit that Verizon won against the FCC in 2014, the agency can’t enforce net neutrality rules without Title II reclassification. “It is the teeth behind the concept,” Wyden says. “And without it the companies aren’t going to do it. We’ve seen them use the legal process previously with court cases to try to get around what net neutrality is all about.”

Now we have to go home and organize in our own communities. We have to hang on to what we felt last Saturday, whether we were in Washington DC, at our local marches or just watching on television. We must remember the solidarity we felt, especially when the work gets hard or boring or someone pisses you off or when you think it should be done a different way or some person or committee screwed something up or when it looks like we are going in twenty different directions and we can’t settle on a course of action.

Or. Or. Or.

And to be perfectly frank, I’m not worried about THEM dividing us. I’m worried about us taking care of that all by ourselves.

We are on the same side. Hold on to that. And be kind to each other. We need ALL of us. And if some of us aren’t as woke as others, if some of us put our foot in our mouth, if some of us are unintentionally oblivious, please, give us the benefit of the doubt.